Latineos - Latin America, Caribbean, arts, culture

The answer is the same reason that ghetto kids fail to climb out of their pit when they get a good chance and why I will cast off the harrowing memories of the book within a few days. It is easiest, even natural, to do what is safe and comforting and quash the whispers of the conscience.

Sometimes, though, this law is overturned. Sometimes, the blood pumps in the opposite direction; never more so than in the love that can be found between a mother and her child. Piri Thomas, writer, poet and activist who died on 17th October 2011 was born on 30th September 1928 to Dolores Montanez Tomas, a Puerto Rican immigrant, in one of New York’s poorest districts. He grew into a street-wise ghetto man, capable of brute force, but it was this maternal bond that Thomas says he clung to in his darkest moments, especially during his six year imprisonment for shooting and wounding a police officer. His mother was long dead by then but, as he describes in the Afterword to the 30th anniversary edition of his book: “At night in my cell, from time to time, I would nourish my soul from her love, reliving past warm memories.”

Yet neither his affection for “Moms” nor his more tortured love for his Cuban father swayed him, during his youth, from his ‘rise’ up the ghetto ranks of Spanish Harlem, otherwise known as El Barrio. In Down These Mean Streets, Thomas describes with fast-paced intensity and biting street language how, as a boy, he fought for his “rep” and his place within the various local street gangs. The reader is let into a world where boys live as men and status is a matter of life or death. Fights did not just take place with knuckles and knives but also with words Fights did not just take place with knuckles and knives but also with words. If there is one aspect of the book that stands out more than the rest, it is Thomas’ dialogue. The street language he uses vividly captures the coruscating and, often, vicious nature of slang. This is most apparent in the street game of “dozens”, in which insults are exchanged between acquaintances to establish supremacy. The language’s vagueness allows for subtle changes in meaning; one game of “dozens” nearly ends up with Thomas attacking his friend, Brew. The use of language as a weapon for establishing a position in the ‘dog eat dog’ hierarchy of prison is only intensified in Thomas’ retelling of his time in Sing Sing.

Thomas’ ghetto ‘climb’ leads him into youth heroin addiction, gun crime, a shooting which nearly kills him and, finally, prison. This is a familiar “arc” which is often used by the arts and media to show how the ghetto machine tortures and finally kills its inhabitants. Darren Aronofsky’s film, A Requiem for a Dream is a case in point, focussing on drug addiction. The American Dream is either pie in the sky or a killer drug to the downtrodden, these polemics seem to suggest. But they usually omit to say how the ghetto fits into the overall machine of the economic system. By failing to make this connection, these works cannot truly challenge the status quo.

At first glance, Down These Mean Streets also fails to confront the fundamental inequities in society that serve to create ghettos and fill prisons. It does not go into the socio-economics of ghetto life. It is a memoir which, although well-written and disturbing, did not change conditions. As Thomas wrote in his Afterword: “alas, the same conditions still exist for the poor today. In fact, they are worsening, with increased cutbacks of vital programs – which to now had given some of the poor a fighting chance”.

There is something about Down These Mean Streets which makes it more than just a memoir. It strikes you within the first few chapters. There is detachedness to Thomas’ voice which, we might assume, helped him to commit barbaric acts. Yet, often, this same detachment is used unexpectedly by Thomas in relation to his friends – as if he is indifferent to their suffering. But he is not an innate brute, as we learn from his acts of kindness and love. He cares for his “boys” but whether it is Littles, the fellow prisoner who goes mad and is transferred to an asylum facility or, at the end of the book, his childhood pal, Carlito, who he finds alone in the night, on a roof landing: “I looked up into a pair of eyes hollowed out like death, like a want, like a stone junkie”, Thomas displays a seemingly contradictory cold-heartedness. He leaves Carlito on the landing, high on heroin and with sores all over his body. He does not offer to help his former friend and he refuses to share with the reader the deep sadness that he must have felt.

Human dignity is one of Piri Thomas' strongest beliefs Human dignity is one of Piri Thomas' strongest beliefs: “No matter a man’s color or race, he has a need of dignity and he’ll go anywhere, become anything, or do anything to get it – anything…” Perhaps, therein lies Thomas’ stoicism; for what differentiates Down These Mean Streets from the film, Requiem for a Dream, is that the characters are primarily actors not victims. Thomas defiantly presents himself, his enemies, his acquaintances, as human beings in charge of their lives, rather than debris being swept up by an unfair society They may be going to hell in a handcart, be helpless junkies and so on, but he is insistent on seeing even the most lowly, degraded person as having a large amount of choice and control over their destiny.

Some would argue that this is an unhelpful and inaccurate picture for it fails to address the inherent inequality that ghetto people are born into. Thomas does, indeed, show how the ghetto retained its pull – at various times he is about to escape when he is dragged back, be it by getting a girl pregnant, a drug relapse, a racist incident, an illness or the craving for camaraderie.

Thomas, in Down These Mean Streets and in the lectures he gave in his later life as a social activist, was not attempting the mammoth task of fixing the system. Instead, he wanted to help those being eaten by society in the ghetto. To pity someone as a victim of circumstance is, in a way, to dehumanise them, that is, to suggest that they are flotsam. To, instead, tell them that they are as much actors as a rich man, is to give them human dignity and equality, regardless of their plight. There is a time and place for tinkering with the system – and for sympathy – but those currently in the hell hole need to know how to survive. Down These Mean Streets is a record of enduring the worst that Western society has to offer and still finding one’s dignity.